Stories like The Crash
of the UK-201 live in the imagination of every Doctor Who fan. Everywhere
there are cracks in the chronology of the show, or unknown beginnings, middles
or after-lives beyond the Tardis, the fans’ imagination will flourish. That
means the likes of The Crash of the
UK-201, which shows us, or seems to show us, Vicki’s life before she met up
with the First Doctor, and how that life might have gone on to be entirely
different had she not met him, will
have fans slavering to listen to it.

Not, as it turns out, slavering without reason. Jonathan
Morris has a solid way with technobabble, meaning there’s a reason why, within
moments of the start of the story, Vicki is catapulted back down her own
timeline, knowing everything she knows from her time with the Doctor and
Steven, but waking up on board the UK-201, the ship on which she was travelling
to Astra with her father when it was sabotaged and forced to land on Dido –
where she would later be rescued by the Doctor, Ian and Barbara.

Initially, the story acts as a drama of the heart versus the
head, and Vicki acts impulsively to save the people on the ship, including the
father she loves, from the disaster she knows will soon engulf them. For
completists and curious fans alike, this glimpse into the pre-Doctor Vicki’s
world is enchanting and heartwarming, as well as grounding the Vicki we know in
a people and a society she never had on screen. But when Steven pops up out of
nowhere, Vicki’s initial success in avoiding the crash of the UK-201 is put
into a darker context. If the crash doesn’t happen, she’ll never meet the Doctor,
and none of the things she does with him (including the rescue of Steven from
Mechanus, their thwarting of the Meddling Monk and so on) will have the
opportunity to happen.

Paradoxes abound, and for a while, The Crash of the UK-201 indulges in a little temporal theory, as it
becomes apparent that Vicki gets ‘do-overs’ – what happens if there’s a dashing
space pilot on board the UK-201 who can avoid the crash, or let it happen, but
happen relatively safely? Does the world still change? Does the original
saboteur escape, or is he carted off to jail? If the crew of the ship survive
the ditching on Dido, do they set up a community? Do they make peace with
native Didoans? Wage war? What?

The potential ends of Vicki’s timeline are explored like a Groundhog Day or Sliding
Doors version of Doctor Who. In some, Vicki’s father lives. In others, he
dies, and Vicki meets a dishy paramedic. In some they have two daughters, in
others, a son. In some, there are tragedies, in others, triumphs. As Steven
seems to step along the quick path down her timeline, dipping out and popping
up again fifteen years, decades, even a century later, we see the potential of
Vicki’s many possible lives and outcomes play out. But Morris isn’t content to
let the episode ‘sit’ at that. Where there are paradoxes, there are creatures
that feed on paradox energy, and when such creatures come looking, all hunger
and probable confusion for Vicki and the reappearing Steven, the companions
start to get some idea of how their lives are going to go – pursued by the
paradox-parasites (a touch of new Who creeping in in the similarity of concept
to the Reapers of 2005’s Father’s Day),
what we then have is a trans-temporal race to sync back up with the Doctor, who
is trying to reach them and pluck them out, like meatballs in what has become a
spaghetti-bowl of causality and lifetimes.

By the end of The
Crash of the UK-201, Vicki’s timeline has been scrambled and re-assembled, but
she’s left with the memories of various versions of it – the father who loved
her and died, the father who lived and turned cold to her, the husband she had,
the gap where he should be, the two daughters, the loss, the progress, the life
of Steven, the death of Steven, the difference her life could have made a hundred
ways, and she remembers them. For a story that starts off from the simple powerful and heartbreaking and wonderful –
just as any life, just as every life
can do. Once you’re born, you get the chance to be anything and everything
along the pathway down which you travel, and the roads not travelled hardly
make themselves felt that often. The
Crash of the UK-201 is almost like a Choose Your Own Adventure book where Vicki,
and sometimes Steven, take every possible pathway, and where Vicki gets to live
the life through which those pathways lead.

The Crash of the
UK-201 is, it may be needless to say, a powerhouse performance from Maureen
O’Brien as all the possible Vickis there are – at 15, at 30something, at 170,
the child, the bride, the mother, the writer, the everything-else-she-is.
Presumably the script is not without impact on the actress herself, who still
plays the young Vicki with the required teenage energy some five decades after
she began to play her on screen. O’Brien shines and really punches the light
and the emotional weight into the story here, letting you revel in a tale
that’s all about Vicki and her potential. Peter Purves, while in this story
very certainly a secondary focus, gives Steven the right level of
screen-accurate problem-solving ability and drive, and gives his rendering of
the First Doctor quite enough higher-pitched expositional fluttering to
convince as late-stage Hartnell, both jolly, irascible and tutting at the
irritating things that happen to threaten or endanger himself and his friends.

The Crash of the
UK-201 is a script that’s bold as a bell, clever in its concepts, and
exhaustive – not to say occasionally exhausting
­– in its treatment of timelines and how their abstract nature translates
to the lives we actually lead and the choices we get to make. It’s almost a
hymn to the character of Vicki, and Maureen O’Brien sings it loud and with the
right intensity. It’s a cracking end to the Fifth series of Early Adventures,
and if you’re a Vicki-fan – and frankly, who isn’t a Vicki-fan? – it’s a
must-listen. Tony Fyler

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